Below is a paste from a recent Wall Street Journal Search I conducted - "science & math" was all I put in the search field.

---------

12/15/04 America's C-

12/15/04 For U.S. Kids, Another Poor Academic Showing

12/13/04 As Math Skills Slip, U.S. Schools Seek Answers From Asia

12/10/04 The Best Ways to Make Schoolchildren Learn? We Just Don't Know

12/7/04 Economic Time Bomb: U.S. Teens Are Among the Worst at Math

--------

As always, I chide any and all of you who support public education, more spending on public education, and/or continuing protection of this corrupt and ineffective industry.

Here are some excerpts from two of the above articles along with my comments.

--------

Economic Time Bomb: US teens are among the worst at math.

15-year-olds in the US ranked near the bottom of industrialized countries in math skills, ahead of only Portugal, Mexico, and three other nations, according to a new international comparison that economists say is bad news for long-term economic growth.

Two of the studies of most unsettling findings: the percentage of top achieving math students in the nation is about half that of other industrialized countries, and the gap between scores of whites and minority groups -- who will make up an increasing share of the labor force in coming decades -- is enormous.

...

But the PISA study holes such potentially bad news for the US economy that Mr. Bush might find it provides him with plenty of ammunition. The studies suggest that there aren't nearly as many bright kids in US schools as there are in other countries -- which could undermine US dominance in technology related fields.

----------

Bruno's comment:

I've posted this before, but it bears repetition (until suburban soccer moms and their emasculated husbands get it). Your suburban schools are barely better than the inner-city schools at educating your kids. The only reason your kids appear to have any advantage is due to the socioeconomic status of where they live and the extra spending on tutoring and other educational support.

Please! Get this through your heads. Your own childrens' development is at stake.

Suburban parent suffer from cognitive dissonance, and my pleading is a attempt to get them to confront it. Their need to believe that their exorbitant property taxes are purchasing something of value seems to trump all evidence that their schools are actually failing miserably. This denial of reality may prevent them from being the "skunk at the cocktail party", but it is their children who will suffer the consequences.

The article excerpted below provides a glimmer of an answer.

--------

As math skills slip, US schools seek answers from Asia

About five years ago, a statewide test in Massachusetts revealed that students' math skills deteriorated sharply as they went from fourth to sixth-grade. Alarmed, the Massachusetts Education Commissioner suggest an unconventional fix: importing the math curriculum used in Singapore.

...

The approach has been adopted in about 200 schools nationwide, from rural Oklahoma to the inner cities of New Jersey. Early indications suggest that many US students taught with textbooks imported from Singapore do perform better in math. Some children who once found the subject frustrating say they now like it.

------

Bruno's comment:

There you have it folks! This article points out one way that parents can dramatically affect the education system. I've always argued that "local control" in America's education system is mostly a myth.

While most voters have the ability to control local taxes, my experience in discussing this with people who have actually gotten elected to school boards indicates that effecting curriculum is one of the toughest tasks a board board member will face -- regardless of how well-informed they are.

Teachers will threaten to quit when confronted with having to teach proven traditional curricula. Superintendents will initiate "town hall" meetings, where they will import consultants and textbook industry hacks to ensure that parents remain uninformed as to the low quality of today's curricula. Should concerned parent succeed in changing the curricula, the interlocking ("Enron" style) control structure of the State Board of Education, combined with school boards, combined with teachers organizations, will circle the wagons to kill any meaningful curricula reform.

All of this is possible only because one of the psychological denial and/or intentional apathy of the today's parents. Interestingly, the poorer, disadvantaged parents of the inner-city are far more aware of how bad their schools are. Suburban parents, a large political support group for our awful education system, studiously refuses to confront reality.

If they did, they would rapidly understand how bad their schools really are, cut their budgets, fire the featherbedded administrators, increase school and teacher autonomy AND accountability, As well as seek out and impose a rational curriculum (which are far less expensive than the progressive drivel published and sold by Houghton-Mifflin, Scholastic, and other subsidiaries of "Big Education.")

For those reading this blog, the onus is on you. If you're not sure you agree, at least take the time to research the issues. A good place to start is www.illinoisloop.org or the web site of the Fordham foundation. If you are one of those who already know that I'm correct, the next step for you to is "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" and do what is necessary.

What is necessary is nothing short of a frontal attack on public edcution. We need to wage a campaign that utterly discredits the "Government/educational complex" and the collectivist ideology that underlies it.

Thomas Franks (who declined to come on my show) is running around the Lefty talk circuit hyping the idea that the VRWC (Vast Right Wing Conspiracy) has fooled the poor old normal people - who should be liberal - into voting against their own interests, all because of "wedge issues" like gay marriage & abortion.

I'll leave aside the flip side to his theory (that all the democrats need to regain power is to throw Planned Parenthood - otherwise known as "Big Abortion" - off the bus)...

and focus on the factual innaccuracy of his claim - i.e. that Kansas is sufferring.

Here is a link to a Wall Street Journal article pointing out just how well Kansas is doing.

"Yet Mr. Frank's characterization of the Jayhawk State is completely--bizarrely--at odds with the facts. Kansas's economy has actually outpaced the nation's for years. Throughout the 1990s and the first part of this new decade, Kansas had a lower unemployment rate than the U.S. as a whole. In fact, when the country's unemployment rate dipped below 5% from 1997 to 2001, Kansas's fell under 4%--a level so low that economists basically consider it full employment. Overall, the state's economy added 256,000 new jobs during the 1990s, a 24% growth rate, compared with a 20% national gain in the same period. Even when the economic slowdown set in and the recession finally hit in 2002 and 2003, Kansas lost jobs at a slower rate than the national economy did."

A few months ago I posted some commentary on the embryonic stem cell research debate. I maintained (and I still do) that the entire political drive to increase embryonic stem cell research is powered by the political need to "save" abortion.

While this is not immediately apparent, it doesn't take long to figure it out. Support for abortion is declining in the United States, and its supporters are in need of allies. As more and more people question the morality of destroying life for the purpose avoiding responsibility for mistakes, abortion supporters are seeking new "markets" for the concept of destroying life.

A nation that is convinced that it should create human flesh (and accurate definition of an embryo) for the purpose ofdestroying it through "research" and "science" will be less likely to be troubled by the increasing (healthy, IMO) cognitive dissonance we appear to be experiencing over abortion.

The fact remains that all of the breakthroughs in stem cell research come from adult stem cells and not embryonic sources. It is also true that there is currently no law against using the current crop of embryos for research. What we are witnessing in the current stem cell debate is an unseemly campaign by pressure groups to mandate the use of government research money as "seed capital" for the purpose of creating a market in human flesh.

A few people commented that I was "way off base" in my views. I just love it when a story comes along that indirectly proves my point.

On Thanksgiving Day, a South Korean woman, Hwang Mi-Soon, paralyzed for 20 years after a spinal-cord injury, rose from her wheelchair and, tearfully and with the help of a walker, took a few steps. Thanks to stem-cell therapy.

The doctors were cautious: Their work needs to be peer-reviewed and replicated. Still, the world has been waiting for this news. Stem-cell therapy has become the most hyped scientific advance since cold fusion. Californians voted to spend at least $3 billion of their money on it. Some politicians want to likewise spend our money. Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards said if Sen. John Kerry were elected president, "people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."

So then why didn't Hwang make the front page of every American newspaper? Has nearly every American editor suddenly turned stupid?

Not likely. More likely it's because the stem cells used in Hwang's therapy were from umbilical cord blood instead of embryos. Why should that make a difference? Because if you favor embryonic stem cells, you are a smart, loving person. But if you favor cord cells, you are a Luddite. If you want to avoid the ethical, moral or religious difficulties posed by killing embryonic human life or by creating it solely for the purpose of prospecting, you are a cruel person who would let people suffer and die from horrible, painful diseases or injuries. Same goes for advocates of "adult" stem cells extracted harmlessly and without any ethical problems from living tissues of adults and children. In short: Good guys equal embryonic stem cells; bad guys equal adult and cord stem cells.

Unfortunately for Bush-haters, conservative bashers and others who have canonized embryonic stem-cell therapy, Hwang's miracle was pulled off with cord therapy--news that a biased media would prefer to ignore.

[If you wish to read a very misleading and generally inaccurate article about Social Security Reform, click here. <http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0412090122dec09,1,5071493.story> MyOp-Ed refuting it is below.]

Thursday’s article attacking Social Security reform ("Social Security will be destroyed under the guise of `fixing' it" by professors T. William Heyck and Michael Sherry) highlights the gap between academia and financial reality.

Heyck & Sherry raised two main points in their opposition to improving Social Security. Their first point was to appeal to the "collectivist" nature of the current "pay as you go" system. This is an ideological and emotional appeal that asks today’s Americans to adhere to a 1930s mentality in the twentyfirst century. It is also a "moralistic" argument, which requires the discussion of various philosophical points of view that might not fit in an editorial article. (Though we’d probably all agree that it is an important discussion.)

Their second argument; that Social Security is basically sound, and can be "fixed" by tinkering at the margins; is the pinnacle of economic "whistling past the graveyard."

Regardless of what many politicians and prognosticators may tell you, the Social Security system is in serious need of reform, and arguing that it can be fixed by "tinkering," serves the public poorly.

Here are some sobering and incontrovertible facts.

The current promise to pay American retirees represents an "unfunded" liability of about $12 trillion ($12,000,000,000,000). There are only three ways to address this funding gap.

1. Raise taxes

2. Lower Benefits

3. Allow Personal Retirement Accounts (PRAs)

Obviously, options 1 and 2 above are bad choices, from both political and policy perspectives. The first option; increasing taxes; is never an easy political sale. It also creates the more serious problem of slowing down the economy and reducing individual wealth & initiative.

The second option; lowering benefits (reducing payments or raising the retirement age), represents the breaking of a promise that many nearing retirement may have been relying on.

Interestingly, the third option; allowing people to place a portion of their FICA taxes in PRAs; addresses the funding gap more effectively than options 1 and 2 with far less political and economic risk.

As a matter of fact, actuarial analysis shows that the higher the percentage an individual is allowed to put into a PRA, the faster Social Security becomes "solvent." This is one reason why the bills currently in front of Congress allow for higher percentages of income to be placed in PRAs than President Bush’s original 2% of income proposed in his 2000 campaign. At first blush, this may seem too good to be true. In fact, it is nothing more than the phenomena of compound interest over time.

For most Americans, the rate of return on private accounts (invested in low cost, broad based stock and bond indexes or government securities) is likely to be far higher than the rate of return on the current "pay as you go" system, which is invested in government IOUs and spent. Therefore, as PRAs grow, the amount needed to fund current Social Security benefit levels is met more rapidly.

Detractors of PRAs often point out that for those who are set to retire in the next 10 years or so the current system may be a better deal. This is addressed in every reform bill by allowing anyone to stay in the current system. This addresses Heyck & Sherry directly. If the current system is so great, you will be allowed to stay in it.

PRAs offer other benefits as well. For example, under today’s "pay as you go" system, if you spend your entire life paying Social Security taxes, retire, and die of a heart attack at your retirement party, your family gets no benefit (assuming you have no children under 21). With a PRA, the money accumulated over your lifetime would go to your estate. This alone would add billions of dollars of net worth to minority families in future years.

Another big benefit is the immediate increase in America’s savings rate. With 6% or more going into PRAs, the American savings rate would increase overnight. This would increase capital available for investment, which would, in turn reduce the pressure on interest rates. In short, this opportunity for reform is one of those very rare win-win-win situations.

So what’s the catch? There are certainly issues that need to be addressed. Critics will raise issues ranging from investment risk to transition costs, and it is important that these are addressed. There are answers to these questions, and citizens should be aware of them.

However, at the end of the day, there will never be a better time to convert the current system; one fraught with demographic and collective risk; to a system of individual choice and empowerment.

The time for Personal Retirement Accounts has come. It is the duty of each of us, as citizens of the USA to understand the stakes involved and the benefits that we can gain from this important reform.

For those of you following the very important and interesting developments in Ukraine, I have a question...

Given all the hubbub about elections, fraud, and fairness, where is Jimmy Carter, gadfly of the international election watchers?

He's in hiding, and here is why. His side lost (or is losing).

Carter, who was once a reliable proponent of democracy, if not freedom & capitlalism, has sunk to being a shill for dictators and thugs. (Witness his whitewashing of Hugo Chavez' stealing of the recent referendum on his failure as a leader).

Carter isn't in Ukraine because he doesn't want the Putin backed candidate to lose.

"At least a part of the Western left -- or rather the Western far left -- is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States. Many of the same people who found it hard to say anything bad about Saddam Hussein find it equally difficult to say anything nice about pro-democracy demonstrators in Ukraine. Many of the same people who would refuse to condemn a dictator who is anti-American cannot bring themselves to admire democrats who admire, or at least don't hate, the United States. I certainly don't believe, as President Bush sometimes simplistically says, that everyone who disagrees with American policies in Iraq or elsewhere "hates freedom." That's why it's so shocking to discover that some of them do."